Yanukovych's response to EU's misgivings before EU-Ukraine summit

...Polish president Bronislaw Komorowski said in a recent interview on the "Signals of the day" [radio programme] - "We will talk [and try] to convince our Ukrainian guest to to make a series of gestures that will confirm Ukraine's wish to get closer to the Western world and increase the chances of him signing the EU Association Agreement with Ukraine at the summit of leaders of the EU and the Eastern Partnership in November this year in Vilnius."

"We will [try to] convince him not only [to make] gestures, but also to really set into motion the announced reforms in the sphere of justice", said the president.

Everyone knows what Komorowski was talking about - he wants Yanukovych to made a gesture regarding the deeply troubling politically motivated persecution of leaders of the Ukrainian opposition.

And Yanukovych's response? - The novice judge Rodion Kiryeev, who sentenced Yulia Tymoshenko to 7 years imprisonment was today promoted to the position of acting deputy head of the Pechersk regional court.

This week former minister of the interior Yuriy Lutsenko could have been released from prison on grounds of ill health. He was not..My guess is that for Yanukovych any such gesture would have been construed as a sign of weakness..which is totally out of the question for a bully like him.
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p.s. Donetsk crocodile Volodymyr Shcherban. will be the next witness to be called to testify in the pre-trial hearings investigating the murder of Yevhen Shcherban. Yulia Tymoshenko is accused of commissioning this crime.

From July 1994 until October 1996 Volodymyr Shcherban was head of the Donesk oblast council. From July 1995 until July 1996 he was head of the Donetsk oblast state administration, or governor.

According to Forbes.ua, in recent testimony to law enforcement agencies, Volodymyr Shcherban alleges Tymoshenko may have been responsible for the death of Industrial Union of Donbas director, Alexandr Momot too.

However following Donetsk mafia capo Akhat Bragin's assassination in the Shakhtar stadium in October 1995, Volodymyr himself started having problems with Ukraine's law enforcement agencies. A commission from Kyiv arrived in Donetsk led by the-then prosecutor general of Ukraine, Hryhoriy Vorsynov. The commission's report was prepared by Vasyl Durdynets, the then vice-PM responsible for state security and emergencies. Durdynets blamed Shcherban [not unreasonably] of permitting organised crime to run riot in the oblast, and directly accused Shcherban of providing 'a roof' for this.

Forbes.ua make the obvious point that this casts a big shadow on any verbal evidence he may have presented to prosecutors in recent days..

Similarly Volodymyr Shcherban claims that in 2005 and 2006, after the Orange Revolution, when he was applying for political asylum in the USA, he told US officials that Tymoshenko and Lazarenko were involved in Momot's murder. However, by his own admission, Shcherban had had serious disagreements with the pair. Lazarenko was already under arrest...so he knew he could 'lay it on thick'. If anything, this would only help his claim for asylum, particularly in the light of Vasyl Durdynets's assertions...

p.p.s. Yevhen Shcherban was shot dead on the runway at Donetsk airport on 3rd November 1996

Akhat Bragin was blown up in the Shakhtar Stadium on October 15 1995, almost a year before Shcherban's death.

Oleskandr Shvedchenko, the president of the Ukrainian branch of Russian gas trader ITERA Energy who were also trying to gain a portion of the Ukrainian gas market, was shot dead in Kyiv on March 28 1996,

Aleksandr Momot, a co-founder of IUD, was shot dead on May 16 1996.

In July 1996, Pavlo Lazarenko survived an assassination attempt, less than two months after he was appointed PM.

Yulia Tymoshenko was born 27th November 1960. When Yevhen Shcherban was shot dead Tymoshenko had not yet celebrated her 36th birthday.

Is it really possible... that in the anarchic, massively male-dominated world of pitiless ex-Communist career politicians, factory bosses, underworld gangsters and hoodlums that dominated Ukraine in the mid nineties, such a young woman could have had a decisive voice on 'who was to live and who was to die?